


Moving Air

by objectlesson



Category: AFI, Justin Timberlake - Fandom
Genre: Angst, LA, M/M, hustin burganlake, wind storm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 00:02:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2792504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's supposed to be Justin's last visit but the windstorm keeps him housebound. In Hunter's house.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moving Air

**Author's Note:**

> It was refreshing to write these two, even though this story is a not as good version of Pulling Out. I had characterization but no conflict, and then the wind tore apart LA a few days later, so this story became a reality. It's angst. I don't know why I make this pairing angsty!
> 
> I don't own them and this never happened! Although Trees did fall all over Hunter's house, to the best of my knowledge Justin wasn't there keeping him company in the heat of it.

It’s nights when Hunter watches the midnight color of his darkened room fade to the cold, electronic blue of dawn when he regrets things most.

He’s been laying in his twin sized bed (he can afford a bigger one but he doesn’t bother with space he won’t use) since four thirty eight am, when it was still silent and dark outside. The sun’s rising now, he can tell, so he groans, heaves his body from the sighing mattress, and fumbles blindly to the kitchen to brew coffee. It’s not as if he’s suddenly going to fall asleep at five am, when the thatch of cement giants starts roaring with traffic miles behind his apartment when morning rush hour starts and the commuters begin their ritual trek into LA

Hunter drinks his coffee black, and imagines the muscles in Justin’s stomach tightening in all of their terrible power, right before his come spills pearly and fire-hot over Hunter’s awed fist. 

His eyes are closed, his chest aching with exhaustion and the shudder that runs through it at the taste of good, but bitter coffee. Good, but bitter memories, perhaps. Hunter wanted to sleep last night, because it was the last night of November. Today is December first, and he doesn’t want to be catatonic. But Hunter supposes that this is the way things work: when he needs to be awake, he tires himself out with worry. The days he needs to be his best, he’s ruined. 

Phone unobtrusive on the table in front of him, Hunter opens his eyes and stares at it, knowing there’s no danger in having it so close to him now. It’s five am. No one’s awake. Justin’s not awake, he’s probably tucked in and blissful and drooling on his silk pillowcases in his enormous bed in Beverly Hills. He doesn’t have to wake up for another seven hours, really. He could sleep until the sun goes down and still make it to Hunter’s apartment on time. 

Hunter’s fingers burn as he picks up his phone, the weight of it cold and treacherous in his palm. Touching the screen, glow of it a rectangle on his heavy-eyed face, Hunter rereads the last texts he and Justin exchanged. 

_is this it then?_

_I guess so._

_I need to see you one last time. There’s stuff I have at your place._

Hunter remembers the hurt pang in his chest at this point, he remembers wanting a fight, resistance, not resignation. Justin never resigned, that was why he hated him on the days he didn’t love him. He was a kid, and he didn’t understand realities without open ends, things like _no_ which weren’t negotiable. 

Hunter wanted a fight, so he laid down and died. It seemed productive, like a lie to oneself.

_I’ll send it to you_

_No. I’m in LA at the beginning of december. I’ll come by on the first. expect me around six._

That was weeks ago, and they hadn’t talked since. Hunter tilts his head back, letting it loll gently from side to side on an intolerably sore neck, the neck of someone who spent hours restlessly turning in bed, thinking about things they should have done differently.

The coffee hasn’t done much yet, mostly it’s making Hunter buzz along his edges, all the parts of him that are touching the air in his dark kitchen. He’s humming, like a florescent light, and above his body he hovers, watching himself fade in and out of visibility like his gaze is blurred with chlorine, faded and quavering. 

His phone vibrates a bright, hard path across his kitchen table, and Hunter starts. He thinks he’s dreamt it, after all the things dissolving from his half-waking brain are images of Justin’s down on his knees, rough cheek pressed into Hunter’s hip bone as they both sigh and Justin says _just sit back, baby, you won’t have to do anything. Let me do all the work._

He snaps to attention, hand slamming out and closing over his phone viperlike. He prepares himself before he looks at it, anticipates one of Justin’s many apologies, one of his many _my thing went late. I’m in Germany for another two days at best. Keep the bed warm for me?_

Hunter gasps out an audible “God,” when the text actually reads. 

_at the risk of sounding desperate, i’m letting you know that I’m on my way to your place. I couldn’t sleep and this thing has been killing me. I had to see you._

It sounds very still outside, even with the far away thrashing sound of cars on the freeway, which can almost be disguised as the tide on days that aren’t December 1st. The air is so still it seems like it’s holding its breath. Hunter stares at his phone, wondering why Justin never says what he expects him to say, and what that means about both of them. 

~*~

In the door frame, Justin is huge. His shoulders take up so much space, and the relief that steals Hunter into almost buckling is instinctual, something he can’t scare away with the context of this visit. He almost reaches out and rakes his open palms across those hard shoulders, down that familiar chest. He wonders what will be different if he does, but his pride stops his body and he stands there on his own door mat, knowing how much shadow is beneath his eyes. 

Justin’s lips look like they want to kiss the shadow away, but Hunter thinks that might be his want talking. 

Justin says, “Baby,” like it aches, like it’s been waiting on his tongue for weeks. 

Hunter says, “Don’t call me that.” 

Justin says nothing. 

Hunter motions for him to come in, pushing everything inside of him down, down, down until his feet are heavy with it as he walks, and he can look at Justin and feel nothing. The sky is a smoggy grey pink as the sun begins its ascent, disappearing as he shuts the door on the dawn. 

He turns around to find Justin sitting at the coffee table, head in his hands, face obscured by darkness. This is the position Hunter would be in if he were alone, but there is no discerning the way Justin’s body is when he’s alone or when he’s with Hunter. These things are the same to him, because Justin’s young and stupid and thinks that Hunter can’t hurt him. Of course, he is wrong. He’s learning that now, Hunter can tell by the pain bunching his neck up, the neck of someone who spent hours restlessly turning in bed, thinking about things they should have done differently.

Hunter won’t take a seat, so Justin is forced to look up, eyes black and flashing. They might be wet; Hunter’s not sure and he’s not wearing his glasses.

“I want to say that I’m sorry first, before I say anything else.” Justin’s trachea sounds crushed. 

“For what?” Hunter asks. 

They stare uncertainly at each other, like neither one of them is sure of what happened, of why things fell apart. If anyone knew this thing even existed, and if that anyone bothered to ask Hunter, he would say something along the lines of _it just did. Or, we would have never worked out. We don’t share the same universe._

Justin’s answer to this has always been, _but we could._

Hunter thinks he knows better, but with his eyes cut to Justin’s along a wavering string of apology, he feels like he’s never known anything, let alone better. 

It’s not that there isn’t anything to say. Instead, there is too much to say and Hunter can’t speak without the threat of some tiny but crucial part of him breaking, so he busies himself by pouring Justin coffee. 

“I don’t have milk,” Hunter says, though he never does and Justin never cares. He offers him the mug, and Justin takes it with a tremor in his hand. 

“That’s okay. Thanks.” 

It is in this moment of quiet, dark tension when Hunter notices that the silence between them has ceased, instead replaced by a strange and foreign roar. In the past, when it’s been windy in LA it buffets Hunter’s house, terrorizing his windows to shaking skeletons in their aluminum frames. The Santa Anas are ostentatious winds. Because Hunter’s familiarity with wind is limited to their forever announced presence, he doesn’t recognize this animal hissing above his house as just moving air, just wind. It’s only when he glances out the blue-grey glow of his window and notices the palm trees bent and buckling against themselves that he identifies the sound. 

“You hear that?” He asks Justin, the only other beating heart within earshot. He doesn’t want to speak to him about anything but the mess laid out before them, but he needs to know that the experience of the sound is shared, that this alien wind is real and not happening inside of him. 

“Is it...wind?” Justin asks cautiously, standing up and walking to the window, where he presses his hand. The heat of it leaves a fading map of condensation, which fades, ghostlike, when he steps away. “Fuck. It’s really bad. It was so still when I drove over here.” 

Hunter springs to his feet and somehow, beyond his will, travels to Justin’s side. The wind pushes his trashcans onto their sides with a dull, plastic clatter. The blue recycle bin spills a stack of old music papers he threw away earlier that week, and they get carried away on separate routes, torn and tattered from being tugged in so many directions. They look like doves being blown apart by a grenade, and for some reason Hunter has to stifle an urge to run outside and collect his once belongings. 

He tears his eyes away and asks, “I wonder why the windows aren’t rattling, they usually--” but he’s cut off by a distant but chilling crack. Before he can register the sound of a branch disconnecting from it’s trunk, a giant frond from the palm tree in his front yard thwacks against the window, starling Hunter and Justin several steps backward. Justin’s hands fly instinctually to Hunter’s forearm, dragging him close in some gesture of protective boyfriend bullshit. Hunter wants to tell him _no, this is over, remember,_ but he can’t make himself. not with his yard in sudden disrepair, not with this apocalypse-wind threatening to break his front window and papers dotting the sky in white. 

The sun is rising. It usually filters in across Hunter’s yard through the distillery of oak branches from his neighbor’s tree, but the pattern is unsettlingly different, and Hunter cranes his neck to see the tree twisting and swaying, previously unquestionable strength lost to the will of something as impermanent and vacant as air. 

“Jesus, if that oak comes down, it’ll come straight through my living room,” Hunter realizes, finally tearing out of Justin’s grasp and grabbing his synthetic leather jacket off the back of his couch. 

“Where are you going?” Justin asks, a note of panic in his voice. He follows closely behind Hunter, so close that the proximity-warmth of his body is more than an imagined thing on Hunter’s skin. 

“We gotta get out of here. I don’t want to be crushed by a tree.” 

Justin has that incredulous look on, the one he gets whenever Hunter tries to talk him out of something. The expression he wears when he cannot fathom what it is about being together that Hunter’s not sold on, that Hunter fears. 

“Baby, if you go out there, you’re gonna get knocked out. Plus, where would you go?” 

“You should probably leave, too,” Hunter says for the sake of consistency, even though he’s losing steam and he knows he’s full of shit. It’s true, he has nowhere to go. Besides that, he doesn’t really want to be smacked in the face with a palm frond, nor does he want to be carried away on some particularly enormous gust. It’s just that the chaos outside is peculiarly preferable to the stillness within. He plays with the light switch, just because it’s there and his hands need something inane to do while he buys himself time to think. It’s only when he notices they’re still in the dark that he realizes the power must have gone out. 

“Fuck, the light’s not working,” he mumbles. “A tree must have fallen on a power line.” 

“See, I can’t drive out there,” Justin says, crossing his arms. “Where in the house can we go where the tree won’t bust through the roof?” 

His practicality is foreign to Hunter, who usually identifies himself as the logical one within the pair that’s no longer a pair. He’s the one who knows the logistics of their _thing_ , whatever it is-- _was_ \--, are impossible. Justin’s the dreamer, the unwaveringly optimistic idiot. Hunter is, however, the one who tends to throw himself out of crumbling houses, the one who runs when things start bordering on the unexplainable.

He lets Justin drag him to the bedroom, where there’s no risk of a tree bisecting the roof, though the risk of a million somehow worse fates. His eyes are closed, and he trips after Justin using the sense of memory, sweat on his hands and the faintest taste of iron in his mouth. 

~*~

 

He’s already put Justin’s belongings in a pile, on his desk. There’s a careful, cleared of space between the notebooks and jewel cases and open address book with the highlighter resting along the binding crease. In that clearing is a hat with Manchester United’s Red Devils logo embroidered. There’s a dogeared copy of a James Taylor biography Justin lent him. There’s a pair of navy blue adidas track pants, which Hunter found balled and forgotten at the foot of his bed, hidden in a tangle of sheets. There’s a toothbrush. A razor. 

Justin won’t look at the pile, and when Hunter tries to mention it he shakes his head, eyes shutting with a decisive abruptness that closes Hunter’s mouth, stops his hand mid-motion.   
“I can’t leave yet, so don’t push me out the door.” 

“Just...that’s where your stuff is. When you leave.” 

Hunter hates every word that’s coming out of his mouth, so he stops talking and leans against his wall, gaze trained on his bare feet. The wind is whistling above them, these sounds that remind Hunter of train stations and factories, mechanical whirring and things that could almost sound human, if he didn’t already know they weren’t. He wants to sit on the bed, but doesn’t, worried that Justin might follow suit and he would be one step closer to disappointing himself. Giving in. 

“I don’t want to do this, Hunter,” Justin finally says outright. 

Hunter bites his tongue even harder, and realizes that the invasive old-penny flavor he’s been tasting is blood wrought from his own teeth. “Do what?” 

“Take my shit and leave once the weather clears up.” 

Hunter doesn’t have time to recognize that Justin’s voice has moved closer. Suddenly the dizzying cologne warmth he’s been dancing around since inviting Justin inside is surrounding him, choking him. The pressure of a body bigger than his is fierce against his chest, a hand raking desperately across his scalp, catching stubble, before it rubs roughly between his legs. He tilts his head up, so that Justin cannot kiss him. 

Instead there’s a rough mouth on his throat, breath hot and voice thick with the words: “I’ve tried everything. I’ve begged, and pleaded Hunt, but you won’t hear me. You can pretend you don’t know what I want, but I’ll be _damned_ if you pretend you can’t _feel_ me too.” 

His voice is ragged, snagged and tearing around all the thorns Hunter’s bristled into it. Hunter stares through his eyelids at the ceiling, willing himself not to speak, not to feel. To not recognize the impossibly perfect feeling of their skin together. Not even to recognize Justin _as_ Justin, merely as sensory input: heat. Scent. Suffocating pressure. 

And, eventually, taste. Texture, wet and soft against his mouth and firm against his dick. Hunter wants to sob with wanting and loathing, but there’s too much blood in his mouth. 

Justin pulls away with a film of pink saliva shining on his swollen mouth, and Hunter can’t look away anymore. His eyes, wide and blue and terrified, zero in on the glistening peak of Justin’s lips. His hands are fisted in Justin’s shirtfront, pulling instead of pushing, and the air is moving outside like it’s trying to bring the world down. 

“I don’t know how to do this with you,” Hunter says, barely audible. He’s saying it to himself, but of course the air between his mouth and Justin’s is minimal, so the other beating heart in the room hears it, and nods. Their foreheads drift together, and Hunter pushes himself into this and braces back, needing some kind of firmness to balance himself on as he grinds into Justin’s palm. 

“You don’t have to know what you want to do,” Justin rasps out,licking a wild, hazardous line up the flexing tendon’s in Hunter’s neck. His teeth scrape Hunter’s jawline, breath busting from him hungry and lost. “You don’t have to know anything. I just want to make you come. I just want to feel you come,” he prays, hand jerking Hunter off through his sweat pants gracelessly but earnestly. Hunter grasps Justin’s strong, ropy forearms, nails digging in starvation. He wants to feel the tiny cords and twitches of the muscles under Justin’s skin, he wants to feel what it’s like. 

“I wish I could show you how fucking good it feels to touch you. To suck you,” Justin pants, reading Hunter’s mind. “I just want you to _know_ , because it seems like you don’t. Like you don’t understand.” 

“Don’s stop,” Hunter’s drowning in Justin’s smell, in the hot, damp air between his own lips and Justin’s strong, taut neck and shoulder. When he comes, his teeth latch onto the skin there, and his knees give way. It doesn’t matter, Justin holds him up until he’s finished streaking the inside of his sweats with threads of come. Then he lets him go slack, and slide to the carpet. 

Hunter takes a few deep breaths, heart thudding suicide-fast against his ribs. He watches as Justin follows him to the floor, hands adhering themselves to either side of his face, thumbs aligned with the corners of his mouth. Now that they were touching, Hunter couldn’t imagine any good reason why he’d ever thought they should stop. All of the endless lists and fears and impossibilities he constructed to keep himself up at night seemed locked away, meaningless and superfluous now that the reality of Justin’s perfect hands were on him. 

“Why do you always do this to us?” Justin asks, tilting Hunter so he’s on his back, limp and quiet on the carpet. The wind answers for him, a cacophony of wordless uncertainties, crying and growling outside. 

“I don’t know,” he tries, unable to make his voice moving air. “It’s hard when you’re gone. I make shit up. I write fictions.” 

“Fiction isn’t real,” Justin answers, eyes sad and dark as he looms on all fours over Hunter’s prone body. “I am. You are.” 

Hunter doesn’t feel much more than fiction, but he doesn’t know what else could cause his sensation of unreality save for fear. Fear that anything good he ever felt would leave, because that was what all of history taught him. 

Justin tugs the elastic waistband of Hunter’s sweatpants down around his hips, exposing his softening dick, twitching and wet. Moved, Hunter places his trembling hand on the back of Justin’s neck while Justin bends down to suck he cooling seed from Hunter’s skin, the nervy oversensitivity of it close to pain. 

The wind howls above them, taking things and scattering things which clatter against the roof. 

“It sounds bad out there,” Justin says, voice muffled by the shuddering skin pulled taut across Hunter’t abdomen. He presses kisses there hungrily, the dark curve of his lashes casting a shadow across his cheek, inhalations desperate. 

“Yeah,” Hunter answers, rubbing idly at the sculpted muscles twitching in Justin’s back. “I guess...” he trails off, breath hitching. 

Hunter imagines his yard littered in debris, palm fronds and the twisted grey skeletons of dead branches and leaves the color of tarnished copper. The last windstorm that tore through LA uprooted trees, and Hunter can tell from the hysteric ripping outside that this is different, worse than the lonely, doleful wailing he remembers. He wonders what would break by the time night fell again, and how long this would last.  
Justin’s hands are all over him, frantic with memorization, but they stop for a moment. “You guess what?”

“That you’ll have to stay here, for today,” Hunter says quietly. 

“Just today?” Justin asks, raising one eyebrow. Something crashes into the side paneling of the house with an abrupt sound like a gunshot, and they flinch. Hunter doesn’t want to, but he can’t stop the easy smile from spreading out across his face. _This is what you do to me_ , he thinks, 

“At least,” is his answer. It is two words and unsure, but that’s something. 

Justin shifts so his weight it’s oppressive on Hunter’s chest, forcing the air from him which he catches and swallows, lips nudging Hunter’s open. They kiss searingly, Hunter’s head lifting off the carpet so he can press all of himself into the flat, hard planes of Justin’s body. They groan in involuntary unison at the startling overwhelm. 

“I’m never gonna let you go. You can try and try, baby, but I’m not gonna let you run from me. Because I know you don’t actually want to,” Justin murmurs against the shell of Hunter’s ear, lips warm and wet on skin. And Hunter knows it’s true, in a way that makes him weak with terror and comfort, which roll together in an oil-and-water mess inside of him. He swallows, cheek scraped raw on the rasp of Justin’s shadowed face. 

“I know, I know,” He says, feeling helpless. The wind sounds like the tide, if he closes his eyes. 

Day is breaking but it stays grey outside, all of the moving air pushing clouds so that any sun which seeps through is temporary, soon to be chased away. Hunter should be worrying about the damage that’s being done to his house, the food that’s going bad in the fridge, the generator he knows he has somewhere but hasn’t had to use in years. He should be, but all he can think about besides the crushed feeling of his lungs fighting for air between kisses is how badly he wants the storm to continue. Because in this room, in this house without power, Hunter feels like he is on an island, with miles and miles of sea stretching out on either side of him. Here, he and Justin are in love and that is enough. 

Hunter knows that when the air ceases its movement, and lights come back on, all of the things that mattered to him this morning will matter again, and he’ll be running on all of the land the ocean briefly replaced. Being in love won’t be enough, because it never is. Things leave, leaves change. Air moves, and he can’t rely on something he can see through, even though it’s sometimes strong enough to tear trees from earth. He only knows how to steal himself. 

But for now, he lets day break and lets Justin kiss him, and believes that he will never let him go as long as he’s surrounded by sea.


End file.
